A building fascia of a type comprising an elongate, rain-carrying gutter combined with a soffit is disclosed in Maloney et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,092,808. As disclosed therein, the gutter is roll-formed from sheet metal such as prefinished aluminum so as to have a socket groove, into which an edge portion of a soffit is inserted.
As disclosed in the Maloney et al. patent, the gutter has a back wall, a bottom wall, and a front wall. As illustrated therein, the back and front walls flare upwardly so as to permit any ice forming in the gutter between those walls to be extruded upwardly without spreading those walls as the ice expands.
The building fascia of the type disclosed in the Maloney et al. patent is available commercially from Omni Products, a division of ZMC, Inc. of Addison, Ill., under the trademark OMNI FACADE.
A known practice of some installers working with such building fasciae has been to apply fasteners such as screws through holes made in the gutters and in the soffits to secure the edge portions of the soffits in the socket grooves of the gutters. A disadvantage of such a practice is that the gutters may leak at such holes despite measures such as gasketing that may be taken to retard leakage.
Heretofore, as illustrated in the Maloney et al. patent, a known arrangement for mounting the gutter in such a building fascia has employed a flat, horizontal ledge having a hooked flange, having an upper surface extending inwardly and horizontally, and extending from an upper, front edge of the gutter, together with a mounting bracket having a hooked end that is hooked over the hooked flange. A disadvantage of such a flat, horizontal ledge is that rain striking the horizontally extending upper surface of the ledge tends to drip along a front surface of the gutter and to streak the front surface.
This invention improves a building fascia of the type noted above by addressing and eliminating the aforenoted disadvantages.